It's Unix All The Way Down…

The Most Important Operating System Ever

Paul McLellan traces the history and influence of Unix, through the people who helped its travels—Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Bill Joy, Linus Torsvald, even Steve Jobs.

The version 6 Unix operating system was about 9,000 lines of code.

Linux is 20M lines of code. Android is about 15M lines of code. iOS is something similar (guesses on the net are 8-10M). But the roots of that code go all the way back to those 9,000 lines of Unix, and much of the operating system interface and the command names that come from there are unchanged 50 years later.

(Via Om Malik)